I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • You’ve got the motive back to front.

    yah, let’s get rid of these cheap, easily manufactured and implemented dials and knobs

    In modern cars those buttons are an input to a body computer which then sends commands over the vehicle data bus to another module that performs the appropriate function. The touchscreen option is much cheaper once you have more than a few buttons to deal with.

    Buttons have different physical shapes, the little decal for the button on each one has to be printed and put on top, each one needs to be connected to power, each one needs to be slotted into the dash somewhere , each one needs to be backlit so you can use it at night, and the signal for each one has to be routed somewhere through increasingly bulky harnesses, etc etc.

    A touchscreen sits on the vehicle data bus and with a bit of software, sends whatever command is needed.

    Is it a great user experience to press fiddly buttons on a touchscreen while driving down a bumpy road? Fuck no. But it is definitely cheaper and less complicated for the manufacturer.


  • Effective advertising has a clear and simple visual language, and this is what UIs should strive for.

    Interfaces can be needlessly complex regardless of being flat or skeuomorphic.

    But flat interfaces still require mental effort to parse. Especially when the interface is complex and/or crowded and you’re trying to pick out active UI elements amongst decorations like group boxes/panels.

    Essentially, flat interfaces are currently popular because of touchscreen devices. Touchscreen devices have limited space and thus need simplistic UI elements that can be prodded by a fat finger on a small screen.

    But I don’t need a flat touchscreen-friendly interface on my non-touch dual 24" monitors with acres of screen real estate. I need an interface that nicely separates usable UI elements from the rest of the application window. That means 3D hints on a 2D screen, which allows my monkey-brain with five million years of evolved 3D vision the opportunity to run my “click the button” mental command as a background process.







  • Thought process goes like this:

    “What’s slowing us down, hardware-wise? These lidars are expensive and a pain in the ass. Let’s disrupt the status quo and ditch them and just use cameras. People drive around just fine with just stereo vision, after all. It might be hard but once we do it we’ll be way ahead of the competition.”






  • Not really, it’s just phrased differently to the usual signup pitch, they’re putting in a middle ground between full “premium” subscribers (whatever that is) and public access with tracking and ad metrics.

    Companies need revenue to operate. They get that revenue from advertising data and selling ad slots, or subscriptions. Whether they actually cease all tracking and ad metrics when you subscribe is something I’d doubt though, and that could be a case for the legal system if they didn’t do what they claim.

    Personally, this behaviour is the point where I would not consider the site to be valuable enough to bother with.





  • Mainly the issues are about providing ~600 kilowatts for 8 minutes to charge your typical size EV battery.

    A row of 5 chargers of that size soaks up 3MW if they’re all in use, and that’s not something that can be quickly or easily shoehorned into a suburban electricity grid.

    It’s about 500 houses worth of electricity usage, for comparison. For just 5 fast chargers.

    Not to say it’s impossible, but infrastructure doesn’t come cheap, and so it’ll cost quite a bit to cram that 80 percent charge into your car’s battery.